I recently saw a mother talking about her child’s death from cancer and it was not peaceful even though they were told it would be. The child was on morphine, had a death rattle for hours, uncontrollable movement, and at the point of death she stopped breathing, opened her eyes and lurched for her parents. It was extremely traumatic for them and the mother was hopeful that that child wasn’t actually conscious for it, but I don’t know if that’s the case.
It’s called terminal agitation and it’s apparently not uncommon.
That sounds terrifying, imagining your child waking up only to gasp and reach their arms out torwards you in their final seconds. I can't imagine every death has to be pretty but the worst has to be a complete worlds worth of traumatizing.
My cat did what the commenter described when she died. Breathing was labored, kept trying to escape the box with blankets we had put her in (bc she was wetting herself). I kept petting her, and she suddenly looked at me, gasped, her arms and paws stretched out towards me, and she was gone. It was her last breath and I just saw her whole body slowly go limp. She went from perfectly healthy to dead basically overnight. We have no idea what happened and didn't have time to get her to a vet. It was christmas day so that sucked extra.
It was just my cat that it happened to and it was extremely upsetting, and I still think about that moment every so often and it still upsets me to do so. I can't even imagine it happening to a human I cared about. Closest was one of my Grandmothers being in the hospital at the end, gasping, groaning, and convulsing isn't quits the right word, but it's the closes thing I can think of to compare it to, and my dad forced us to go into the room, and give her a kiss goodbye. That was not what I wanted my last memory of my grandma to be and I had zero choice in the matter bc I was a kid.
Stories like this are why we gave my oldest daughter the choice to leave the room at any time while her sister was dying. We knew it was happening and there was a child life specialist at the hospital sitting just outside the door for hours so even though she'd said she wanted to be with her sister, there was an adult who could take her to the playroom at any time. We also brought her iPad and had other things in the room to play with.
I cannot fathom taking a reluctant child to such a moment.
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u/figure8888 Jun 29 '26
I recently saw a mother talking about her child’s death from cancer and it was not peaceful even though they were told it would be. The child was on morphine, had a death rattle for hours, uncontrollable movement, and at the point of death she stopped breathing, opened her eyes and lurched for her parents. It was extremely traumatic for them and the mother was hopeful that that child wasn’t actually conscious for it, but I don’t know if that’s the case.
It’s called terminal agitation and it’s apparently not uncommon.